TAQWACORE WEBZINE

Blue skies, potholed streets in Oaklandistan – I was craving halal hot links as I drove by the halal market. It was Friday, and I was stealing some “me” time away from my job on the campaign trail. In my head though I was still working, thoughts preoccupied, stressed about finances and wondering if we were going to win the race. I paused in thought, seeing men in thupis and women in hijabs walking briskly down the street. They were all heading down the street behind the halal market – to the mosque. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard – it blinked 1:00 pm. Jummah time. I glanced down at my strappy summer dress. Haram. At least, haram enough that I would feel guilty buying hot links at the halal shop during Jummah while people judged my attire.

So I kept driving.

A couple blocks away I pulled over to the side of the road next to Mama Buzz. I’d never been before, and was desperately in need of coffee. As I parked a stunning woman stared down at me from the wall. It looked like her mouth was in mid-ecstasy, mid-enthralled, mid-life shattering. Oakland is full of graffiti, but this one was stunning in a way that made me gaze at the mural from my car for a good minute as I slowly parked.

As I got out of the car, I noticed a guy watching me as he leaned against the windowsill across the street from where I parked. He was wearing green leggings, a black leather kilt and a wild unkempt hairdo to match his beard. He was completely tattooed with branches creeping up his neck out from his collar, eyes lined with tattoo as if with kohl, and legs inked in Arabic scripts.

“Kazem?” I asked hesitant as I walked towards him.

“I knew you’d eventually find me,” he responded firmly, taking a drag on his brown cigarette.

The only time I had met Kazem was at Mike Knight’s bachelor party. Well, it wasn’t as much a bachelor party as much as it was a punk show. It was the night before Knight’s wedding and The Kominas & Sarmust were touring across the country to the wedding and were doing a show at the Stork Club in Oakland, just a block away from Mama Buzz. Kazem had organized the show, created the flyer for the night and was the opening act. It was the first night I met most of the Taqwacore family.

When Kazem took the stage, no one really knew what to expect. It was the first time most everyone in the Taqx crew had heard of Kazem. He took the stage with rigged classical instruments that he had modified with metal work. His band’s name was the Mujahideen Bernstein Affair. He played a set, a mix between classical sounds and a punk rock edge. By the end of the set, all the punk kids were mesmerized, sitting on the floor of the sticky punk venue and hypnotized by the ethereal sounds.

“How’s it going?” I asked hesitant. I grabbed a seat next to him on the ledge.

“Sleepy. Just woke up after going to bed at noon yesterday,” he replied. I couldn’t help but think about what an incredible coincidence it was that he just happened to be awake after a 24 hour sleep span and on this street corner on my one day off. “How are you liking Oakland?”

“I like it…” I said. “Well, I love Oakland. It’s just the job. It’s tough.” I tried to change the subject. “Who’s that?” I nodded at the woman on the wall.

“Well, they were modeling it after Etta James, kind of. But trying to make an abstract woman to represent a voice,” he said. “The mural is actually seven different artists, local taggers. The Baptist Church there commissioned them to make the art. You can tell the difference of who did what art work.” It was true – the woman may have been the best thing about the artwork – the sea turtle in the corner was the second best – everything in between looked cartoonish at best.

As we looked at the art work, an old 80′s white Cadillac parked in front of us. The two guys inside started casually rolling a joint with pot pulled out of a cookie tin. On the sidewalk across the street a transvestite in hot pink hot pants and her pimp walked by arguing. Down the street white hipster kids sat drinking coffee. This was West Oakland.

We caught up, if you could call it that. I hadn’t really spoken to him before – at most we  had talked about tattoos at the chicken and waffle place where we had all gone after The Kominas show. What really ended up happening as we sat on that ledge was that Kazem started to share stories. Stories about the history and politics of the area, stories about his Persian ancestry, stories about Section 8 housing around the corner, stories about the disco “girls” that now give $20 blow jobs around the corner since their party place was shut down by the City, stories about the Trustafarians that took over the neighborhood and drink alcohol openly during art walks.

The stories started pouring. What is it about finding a Taqwacore that makes the stories start pouring?

As he talked I noticed a tattoo on his right arm that caught my attention. “I like that one,” I said, pointing it out. It was a black rectangle with a empty shape imposed in the middle. Inside that was Persian script. It was crisp.

“It’s a body bag, can you see it?” I looked again. I could see the outline of the body inside the black rectangle. “It’s in honor of Black Friday – the day in Iran where hundreds of student revolutionaries were murdered. They had these body bags that were lined up evenly, so straight.”

I had heard about it. Probably watched it in Persepolis. It reminded me to how Bangladesh’s revolution was similarly started by the students, and how students had been body bagged in that revolution too.I was reminded of all the monuments I had just seen in my recent trip to Bangladesh honoring these students. I had forgotten about it until that very moment. Right, I was meant to remember.

It all felt serendipitous.

I asked him about his music. They hadn’t put out anything new, he had been putting his creative energy into a motor bike that he was building. It was his latest muse, teaching him to enjoy life for what it was and that everything in life didn’t need to have a cause. That some things can just be and that can be a joy in itself. “We are playing next week though…”

“Where?”

“At a pyramid grand opening.”

“A pyramid? Like in front of a pyramid?”

“My friend of mine built a pyramid, so he wanted us to play at the grand opening. Inside the pyramid. You should come!”

“I can’t… I probably have to work. How big is it? The pyramid?”

“Big enough to play in it. So it must be pretty big.”

“Hmm… next time.”

Before I left, he took me to his studio. He wanted to show me his muse. In the basement of an art space, it looked like an epic hovel. Musical instruments hung from the ceiling, bits and pieces of metal and wood were organized on every inch of the wall, a work bench was littered with working tools. His bike was resting in the back, red and Islamo-green. It was embellished with brass skulls and arabic script. It was everything you would think a Taqwacore motor bike would look like, basically. Before I left, he showed me the flyer on his computer from last year’s punk show. I had been asking about it. He was turning it into a shirt. And on the back of the shirt design, in Arabic script – “Oaklandistan.”

My order for the shirt is in.

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Serendipity. Magical. A story. A moment. A pause. A breath. It was the slap in the face that I needed to get my head out of being worried about money, the campaign, and where my next meal was coming from. Have faith in Allah. He is after all, the master storyteller. Trust in the universe. Serendipity happens when you let it. Don’t lose focus with the day to days of reality – there is more. Every now and then pause. Pause. Pause. Thank Allah and pause.

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Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is an activist and writer living in Oakland. She is the Founder of South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), an aspiring novelist and a long-time blogger for the popular South Asian blog Sepia Mutiny.